#0032 - Mike Baker

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience episode 2355 with guest Mike Baker.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

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So Cecil, today we're going to be covering Joe's July 25th interview with Mike Baker.

So how did Joe introduce Mike in the show notes?

It says Mike Baker is a former CIA covert operations officer and current CEO of Portman Square Group, a global intelligence and security firm.

He is also the host of the President's Daily Brief Podcast, a twice-daily news report on critical events happening around the globe on all podcast platforms, twice daily.

Twice daily.

We are not going to be taking this short twice daily.

When I hear you have a twice-daily podcast, what I think is you don't work very hard on your podcast.

But I could be wrong.

That could be entirely, entirely unfair.

Absolutely.

It might be a very hard worker, Mark.

I've never listened.

Maybe it's on the list of things we should maybe listen to in the extended Rogan verse.

That we may be sort of of venturing out to in the future.

But before we do that, is there anything else we should know about Mike Baker?

So, Mike, Mike Baker spent more than 15 years with the CIA working as a covert field operations officer in counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and counterinsurgency.

After leaving the government service, he moved into private sector as a CEO of his business that I mentioned earlier, and he does the president's daily brief.

He's the host of that show.

He served as a technical advisor in the entertainment industry and appeared on Fox News's Red Eye, appeared on The Deadliest Warrior, Spy, Opie and Anthony, Joe Rogan, which is mentioned, and then also the Gutfield show, Greg Gutfield show.

Yeah, okay, okay.

And what did he and Joe talk about in this episode?

You know, they talked about the Epstein files, kind of, mostly as a way to jump off into other conspiracies and right-wing talking points.

They specifically focused on how bad NPR is, and that will be our undercard this time.

They also touch on South Park, congressional insider trading, AI music, and screenwriting.

And they wish a happy birthday to a child that has the name of a pet Rottweiler.

They do.

They absolutely do do that.

Well, before we get to our main event, which is going to be doing running interference for Trump's involvement with Epstein, essentially.

That's essentially what they're going to talk about, Epstein and jumping off from there about whether we should be too worried about Trump's relationship with Epstein.

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Check all that out at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

But for now, it's our main event.

So, a huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast.

That was Nick Korn of Orlit Ku Studios, currently one of the hosts of the anime first watch/slash rewatch podcast, Deep in the Weebs, which you can find at youtube.com forward slash at DITWPod.

And they were announcing our main event.

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under the wire nick.

All right.

So we start the show.

And Mike, I suggest Mike Baker's ex-CIA,

very,

seems very military, you know, comes in, sits down, and they sign.

Serious guy.

They start shooting the shit.

And what comes up 22 seconds in is Joe Rogan asking a question about what sort of like is very popular right now?

What's in the popular consciousness?

God.

Did you see the South Park episode?

Which one did you think?

They did a Donald Trump one with Satan?

No.

No.

It's fucking hilarious.

I got it.

I love the show.

It's fantastic.

I raised my three boys on that show, much to my wife's horror, but it's a great show, but I haven't seen that episode.

When you think, like Bridget Fedesey had a funny quote, like when you think that they have reached the bottom of the highest level of not giving a fuck, they reach unseen levels.

The whole Epstein thing is so crazy.

Like, and him saying, What do you care?

Why does everybody care about Epstein?

Like,

Joe really crushes that quote, though.

He says, when you think they haven't reached the bottom of the highest level of not giving a fuck, they've reached unseen levels.

Yeah, yeah.

I had to try and map that out in my head.

It's like an MC Escher compliment.

Like, we're going up to go down.

We're going down to go up.

There's a hand drawing a hand.

It's a great compliment.

but joe here like he's really keen to let everyone know that he thinks it's funny making trump making fun of trump now it's hilarious that south park did that um and that i think that's because he couldn't not talk about the fact that south park came after trump or he'd have no credibility at all in his fan base even though he has been like completely on board with trump for almost every bit that we've covered on this show every time we've seen him mention trump on this show he is so pro-Trump but he can't even he can't stand back and

maintain that without acknowledging the fact that South Part have come

shooting for Trump.

And I think it's one of those moments where there's sort of these competing things, like we've seen on the show multiple times, there's competing ideas that you need to sort of pick one.

And Joe, I think, here is picking the Epstein files over Trump in some ways, because...

I don't think he would have any credibility if he didn't give any credence to some of the stuff that's coming out about Trump and how Trump is trying to suppress this sort of information.

So he can't, I don't think he would, you can't bank that long on the Epstein files and then just throw that away and say, well, he doesn't want us to see it and that's okay.

I think he has to say something.

Now, I do see that he is very easily manipulated and moved away from it throughout this entire episode.

But I think initially he has to seem like he's on this side.

Yeah, exactly.

This is the talk and nod towards Trump's a bad guy, but as we'll see, his focus will not stay on Trump being the target of the blame for all the Epstein stuff.

And we'll find some very unexpected people to blame for what the real issue with Epstein was.

And also, I'm just going to sort of say here, I've seen people pointing out how remarkably brave it was that South Park came after Trump, you know, just after they signed this $1.5 billion deal with Paramount to sell all their episodes.

Like they signed that deal and the very next day they came so hard for Trump.

And isn't that amazing?

That's how you do it.

You take the money and then you do this.

I think the easiest time to be brave is when you just got the $1.5 billion in your bank account.

I think the hardest time to be brave is before you get that, is before you have that signed.

So yeah, it's nice to see them wake up to how bad Trump is once their deal is conveniently over the line and they are billionaires.

Also, I saw that episode.

I don't think the episode was anywhere near as funny as it's being hyped.

Me and my wife watched it and we just thought this is very weak satire.

It's just, oh, you're doing this Adam Hazane thing where he's having sex with Satan, but you just change the head, not the advantage of it.

You just change the head for a little bit.

Yeah.

I also want to say, too, like there's a real problem using satire against this administration.

I'll include a link in the show notes to a Twitter post where Christine Noam is using the image of her to advertise to join ICE.

So the image, the very image that they used of her, the drawing they made of Christine Noam that was supposed to be unflattering is literally her profile picture or whatever that she's using or at least an image that she's using to try to advertise to join the immigration customs and enforcement.

Yeah, you can't shame the shameless.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great point.

All right.

Now we're going to talk just for a second about his interview with Cash Patel because they did talk about Epstein and we covered it.

So let's see how accurate Joe's memory is.

The Epstein stuff is so crazy because when Cash Patel was on here and he was like, there's no, there's nothing.

And I was like, what are you talking about?

Yeah.

I didn't even know what to say.

My thought was, and people are like, why didn't you push back more?

My thought was like, I'm just going to put this out there and let the internet do its work because there's nothing I can.

The guy's saying there's no tapes, there's no video.

That doesn't make any sense.

Everyone knows it doesn't make any sense.

Let's just, and then he didn't know about the Mike, the Michael Badden stuff, the autopsy stuff, where it showed that he had three broken bones in his neck, which never happens when you hang yourself.

Even when you like leap from somewhere with a rope around your neck and it snaps your neck, you never have three broken prison cells.

He's not launching himself off the first floor balcony.

The whole thing is nuts.

And then he's like, well, we have a film.

We're going to release that film.

And the film has a fucking minute missing from it.

Yeah.

Like, do you think we're babies?

Like, what is this?

Also, you got, you got people, including Dampongino, right, making bank for a couple of years talking about how awful it is.

And we got to get this shit.

And this is this huge conspiracy.

And, and then you release a two-day, you know, a two-page memo that says, yeah, there's nothing to see here.

Yeah, because you're walking by your bedroom window and you see a little laser.

little red laser moving across your chest.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we covered, as you say, we covered the

Cash Patel episode very recently.

And that's not how I saw the conversation go down at all.

Like, his excuse here for not pushing back with Cash Patel was, well, I just thought I'd better put it out there and let the internet do the pushback for me.

That's a very convenient way to absolve yourself, especially on the world's largest podcast platform, your largest podcast in the world.

Is it really responsible?

Even if he thinks that's what he was doing, to say, I'm just going to let the internet do the debunking of this conversation I'm having.

But you and I saw it, and that is not what was happening.

He was buying what Cash was putting down.

Absolutely was.

He was, he didn't push back because he believed what Cash had to say at the time.

It's very obvious when you listen to it.

Also, how bad do you have to feel that you came on Joe's show, you kissed his ass, and then he throws you under the bus, and you're still the director of the FBI?

That's got to be a crazy moment in your life.

Real eye-opener if the cotton gets out.

Also that line where he's like, oh, I just, I didn't want to push back because I figured I would let the internet do it.

That sounds like I'm going to get my big brother to kick your ass so bad.

Doesn't it sound like that?

It sounds

to me when everybody talks about how Joe's like this

person who exudes a masculinity that draws a lot of people in.

I hear him say that and I think that sounds cowardly to me.

It doesn't sound like somebody who

exudes that sort of sense of power and sense of, I don't know, like self-assuredness that would be necessary to

be involved in a conversation like that.

It feels weak to me.

Yeah, exactly.

And I would be surprised if this went over with Joe's audience, because that it just, it doesn't seem at all convincing that Joe would be somebody who just who's happy to admit he silently lets people say stuff, just agrees with them, and hopes that his fans can pick apart what's true and what's not.

I don't think that that would go over well with Joe's audience.

But he's also stuck on how bad it was that Cash didn't know about the opinion of the guy who didn't conduct the autopsy, the guy who, as you pointed out in the show that we covered with Cash Patel, he's talking about Michael Baden.

He's known for having sensationalist takes on celebrity crimes.

And Joe is still hung up on that.

This guy like, well,

what do you think about the guy from telly who hadn't seen the body, but had this opinion?

Why wouldn't Cash know that?

And he's also, you know, that guy was completely wrong about the bones in the neck and the way that they can break during hangings.

He's got some very factual details wrong that Joe is just completely overlooking because it fits the narrative he wants to be true here.

Absolutely.

It's confirmation bias.

And we looked at that article in the New York Times that listed Michael Badden.

as saying one thing, but then three other doctors saying that's not true, right?

So you have Michael Badden, who, you know, someone had sent us a message and said he's a qualified person and i don't think he i don't disagree that he's probably a qualified person to do this work but when you have an article that says and the person who actually did the autopsy all saying that this can happen through hanging that doesn't necessarily mean that this other guy is right and he he's he he like like we suggested has had some controversy in the past about being someone who has leaned more on his celebrity than he has on his MD and the other things that he's been he's worked his career on.

But the thing about this is, this is also very clearly the hole that MAGA finds itself in, the whole MAGA movement, because they have trained the base of supporters to be suspicious, to look for conspiracies, to look for anomalies and things that don't make sense.

And now that base is suspicious of them.

Now that base is suspicious of the people in charge.

So this is kind of the chicken coming home to roost.

It's what's wrong with when, with, with courting conspiracy theory as a means of achieving political power.

What I think is really interesting is I just watched like a 15-minute CBS report, and they're milking this whole Epstein thing as much as you can a story.

The things that they did was they hired a person to make a like a 3D rendering of this area that they have this camera footage of.

And I think a lot of people suspect when they watch this footage that the DOJ released that you're looking at the door of Epstein's cell.

You are not looking at the door of Epstein's cell in that image.

You are looking at the stairway, not all of it, part of the stairway that goes up to Epstein's cell in that footage.

His cell is not

in the shot.

In fact, it's often like to the side.

It's outside of camera view, and part of the stairway is offside to the camera view.

And they talk a lot about it.

And now that we're sort of picking apart every little thing about the Epstein thing, more and more anomalies pop up because you're digging more and more and more into it and i think what's really interesting is if joe even knew that he might be even more suspicious of the video but joe loves the conspiracy and doesn't really care about any of the stuff that's happening in it so he will just repeat things that he hears but never really look into it for himself and we will see that sort of happen throughout this entire episode.

He will say things that are completely factually untrue because he doesn't really, I I don't think he really cares about the underlying truth of any of this stuff.

I think he cares about the juiciness of the conspiracy.

Yeah, he likes the vibes.

He doesn't like to do the detail to see what's actually being said.

It's the same reason he was calling for the release of the Epstein flight logs long after they were actually released.

Now they're going to talk about Ghelane Maxwell,

the person who was essentially

the person who facilitated a lot of the sexual assault that Epstein committed.

That person is in jail and they're going to talk about it.

But they're actually doing right as we speak,

and I find this fascinating, is that the assistant attorney general, Todd Blanche, is down in Florida for an interview with Ghillaine Maxwell.

And she's serving 20 years in a Florida prison for sex trafficking, right?

To who, though?

What's that?

To who.

Well, he's down there to interview her.

But I'm saying

she sex trafficked.

Oh, well, she was a co-conspirator of Epstein's, right?

But don't you have to have a person who you're sex-trafficking?

Exactly.

And they talked about the victims somewhat during her trial.

It was very, I mean, it was a very difficult trial in the sense of, you know, they're trying to protect certain victims and others were coming forward.

But, you know,

my surprise was nobody from DOJ has ever, according to her legal team, nobody has ever interviewed her from DOJ.

Department of Justice.

So this is the first time the Department of Justice, you're telling me, and meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, you've got Democrats like Adam Schiff and others going, we have got to release these fucking files.

They had four years under the previous administration, right?

Look, everybody's fucked in this situation, but they had all that time to do whatever they wanted to do.

And nobody up until this point, apparently, has talked to her.

Now, you know, some folks on the legal side are saying, well, look, if she had anything interesting to say, she would have said it during the course of her trial, right, to save herself or to cut a deal.

No.

But now.

I don't think so.

I don't

kill her.

The smartest thing for her to do is to keep her fucking mouth shut, which is what she did.

They put her in a cushy prison where she could do yoga.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yoga in prison.

That doesn't sound good.

So Joe still doesn't get it that she is convicted of trafficking victims for Epstein to abuse.

She trafficked him, trafficked those victims for him.

So Joe thinks that trafficking has to involve this vast network, a huge list of clients, a massive conspiracy, something shady.

If you're grooming and transporting underage girls to be abused by even one person, that is sex trafficking.

Yes.

And that is what she is convicted of.

Yeah, we've said this before.

He hasn't even bothered to look up what she was convicted of.

So this is from the indictment.

From at least 1994

through at least 1997, Ghelene Maxwell assisted, facilitated, and participated in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of minor girls by, among other things, helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and and Epstein to be under the age of 18.

As a part and in furtherance of their scheme to abuse minor victims, Maxwell and Epstein enticed and caused minor victims to travel to Epstein's residences in different states, which Maxwell knew and intended would result in their grooming for the subject and for subjection to sexual abuse.

So it says right in there, it doesn't list anybody else's names.

It doesn't say there's a vast conspiracy of people.

It says right in the

exactly who it is.

And you can hear in that comment that Mike Baker doesn't understand what Joe is saying.

Joe is saying to who?

And he's like, oh, well, the victims were, he goes off on the victims.

He never once says, oh, there's a vast conspiracy.

He thinks that it's pretty obvious that it was for Epstein, but Joe completely misses it every single time it's brought up.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

And also, I'm not persuaded that it's definitely true that nobody tried to speak to her.

Now, they say that nobody from the the Department of Justice spoke to her at any point.

Maybe that's a wrinkle in terms of exactly which department was talking to her at any point.

But if you look at her sentencing memorandum from 2022, it says, quote, the record of sentencing makes clear that the defendant has engaged in a significant pattern of dishonest conduct, which speaks volumes about her character.

The defendant's record includes the following.

that it lists these sort of separate bullet points.

In 2016, the defendant testified under oath in a civil disposition in connection with a lawsuit, lawsuit bought by Virginia Roberts, and lied repeatedly during her testimony.

For example, she denied, among other things, having given Annie Farmer a massage as the evidence at the trial established, that was a lie.

So she has given some testimony as part of her defense in this.

And what they're saying is she lied about it.

It goes on to say upon her arrest, the defendant was interviewed by pre-trial services and told them that the home she owned in New Hampshire was owned by a corporation and that she was just able to stay there.

That was a lie, as were her statements to pre-trial services about her her finances in an order denying the defendant's renewed application for bail the court remarked on the defendant's lack of candor about her finances and concluded that the defendant had misrepresented key facts to pre-trial services and by extension the court so there's another body who has actually spoken to her There's another one here.

November 1st, 2021, the court allocated the defendant about whether she had engaged in plea discussions with the government.

Although the court's question called for a yes or no answer about her plea offers, the defendant elected to volunteer the following: I have not committed any crime.

That was a lie.

It goes on: the defendant reported that she has almost no assets, a sharp contrast from the defendant's early representation to the court in pursuit of bail that she had $22 million in assets.

In short, the defendant apparently decides when she wishes to disclose facts to the court, and those facts shift when it serves the defendant's interests.

And it goes on: finally, in short, the defendant has lied repeatedly about her crimes, exhibited an utter failure to accept responsibility, and defended and demonstrated repeated disrespect for the law and the court.

So lots of authorities have tried to speak with her to find out what she knows, but they stopped trying to do that when it became clear that she would say anything at all if she thought it would benefit her.

Sure.

Regardless of how many lies she has to tell, how many provable lies that she has to tell, which arguably is why other people weren't seeking her out to tell her story in the intervening four years.

And it's also arguably why Trump's team went to speak with her.

And then lo and behold, she came out recently and said that she never saw Trump do any wrong.

And now I believe she's been moved to a minimum obscurity prison, which feels a lot like a quid quid pro quo from somebody who was proven on the stand multiple times to be willing to lie in order to get the quid quid out of things here.

This, to me, though, this, this is sort of indicative of the rest of the program.

This moment where what they try to do is while they mention one thing, they will whataboutism to the Democrats.

They will constantly try to bring up other people involved to try to say, hey, what about the Democrats?

They had four years to bring this up.

Why didn't they bring this up then?

And it's like, well, they didn't use it as a weapon during the, during the election season.

And now

they didn't try to convince a bunch of people using it, which is why they never brought it up before.

You're the one who brought it up.

The side that brought it up was the Republicans who brought it up.

And, you know, also, by the way, Epstein was arrested and then he killed himself in prison during Trump's Trump's term.

And I think people seem to try to forget that.

Even Joe tried to change and fudge the dates on that recently.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

They're doing everything they can to shift the focus away from Trump's relationship with Epstein, as if the real scandal here is Adam Schiff and as we'll see kind of later in the show when we get to the undercard, NPR and the Atlantic and various other people, and not that very real and very clear relationship that Donald Trump had with Jeffrey Epstein and Gheline Maxwell.

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All right.

Now they're moving on.

They're still talking about Epstein, but they're going to talk about some other things that

the Trump administration has talked about releasing.

I will say that

the Epstein situation is going to be so disappointing to so many people now because

I have this theory that nothing ever gets done in Washington, D.C., right?

Investigations go to die there.

Nothing ever happens.

There's never any real consequences of any nature.

And we've got all sorts of things happening right now, right?

So the Epstein case is just one of them.

But right now, you've got the Dems focused on Epstein because, you know, again, they see

a good opportunity here to go after Trump, regardless of who else is in the files, right?

And the Dems, I think, were worried for quite some time and didn't pursue it because, you know, years back, they were thinking, okay, Clinton's going to be embarrassed.

We don't want that.

So, again, my point would be just release everything.

I don't understand how, if you just look at the way that they handled this logistically, whoever thought,

because the mob wants to eat, right?

And they've been throwing red meat to the mob about Epstein files now for years.

It's part of how they got elected.

Right.

And so whoever in their communications group or in their strategic thinking arena in the administration thought, you know, that we can get away with just saying there's nothing to see here, they should be fired, right?

Because there's no way you can satisfy this mob.

And now the mob is oddly bipartisan because it's got the Dems and it's got part of the base of Trump in there.

Yeah.

And they're all

screaming to have this, goddammit, just release this shit.

Otherwise, this is going to be around like Martin Luther King and John F.

Kennedy.

Well, that's what's crazy.

They did release more Martin Luther King

documents, which is really crazy.

I mean, Mike Baker is kind of right in identifying that Trump's team has been playing to this conspiracist mob and throwing them red meat, and now they're getting eaten by the mob who's been trained on eating red meat.

But Joe does not want to hear that because he is both the middleman for that red meat and its most visible consumer.

It's so true.

But he does mention, he does say, he's like, yeah, they won the election on it.

And it's, and I don't disagree.

I think he's right there.

He was some of the reason they won the election on that because he was the one sort of pushing this during.

Also, notice that Mike is saying, Mike Baker says, whoever in Trump's communication team who thought this was a good strategic idea to say there's nothing here, they should be fired because we have to shift the focus.

We have to shift the blame.

And now the blame for all of this is on whoever in the strategic thinking team that Trump,

nameless person in the bureaucracy.

No blame falls on Trump for having a relationship with Epstein here.

That's not an issue.

And then Baker even loops in MLK files and JFK files to talk about how long-running a conspiracy Fiwi this could be.

And Joe just immediately pops off on the MLK files that were released, released in order to be a distraction.

And then we just take off down that track so quickly.

He just buys that distraction and now he runs with it.

Yeah.

And this, and this is the, this is picking up exactly where the previous clip left off with MLK.

Like, why are you holding secrets about the murder of one of the most beloved historical figures of all time?

Yeah, from 1968.

Part of it is just released.

Yeah, part of that's a family request.

The family has asked, you know, in the past, on a number of occasions, they really don't want some of this because some of it, look, some of it's salacious about, you know, Martin Luther King, which doesn't take away from everything that he did right as a leader of a cause and a movement uh but some of it is you know extramarital affairs yeah so there's been some push to be concerned about that but but yeah now do the epstein files well they'll do it in the same amount of time 56 years from now

just like they did with him it's 56 fucking years later they released this stuff this and and and we're still not any closer to i mean

again i don't want to disappear down that rabbit hole but we're still not any closer with martin luther king i'm you know again not a conspiracy guy except today, apparently, but there's

shit there.

You've said multiple times that if there's one that you think looks really bad, it's that one.

It's that one.

So just notice at the start that Joe is saying about the MLK files, why are they just releasing it now?

Why are they releasing it now?

And the answer is...

There was a family request to not release some of this stuff.

So Joe has these big, incredulous questions like, why is this?

But if you genuinely had that as a question, he'd look for an answer and he'd find an answer he's got no interest in actually finding the answers he's got interest in asking the questions that seem provocative um but this release this recent release of mlk materials you know against the the family's wishes apparently was very clearly done as a distraction yes and it's it's one that joe has either completely fallen for or he's willing to act like he's fallen for.

And we'd be fully off on that tangent for a large chunk of this show if Mike doesn't actually do the effort of bringing it right back.

But throughout this conversation joe is going to continue to take the bait on other distractions uh from the from from this kind of uh scandal and mike isn't always going to be willing to hold him back off them he actively indulges and encourages some of those distractions throughout this conversation And if you heard what they just had to say about MLK and the release of those files, and you wondered, well, what are the objections of the family?

I want to read a piece from the King Center.

This is directly from the family.

The release of the files must be viewed within their full historical context.

During our father's lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J.

Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The intent of the government's COINTEL PRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle, and destroy Dr.

King's reputation and the broader American civil rights movement.

These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but the intentional assaults of the truth, undermining the dignity and freedoms of a private citizen who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.

While we support transparency and

historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father's legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.

We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father's legacy and the significant achievements of the movement.

Those who promote the fruit of the FBI's surveillance will unknowingly align themselves with an ongoing campaign to degrade our father and the civil rights movement.

And I'll link the rest of that statement, but it's more,

it's a little more in-depth than what he has to say.

They didn't like the idea of this, but they're saying that the government literally had

an opportunity and a way in which to dig up dirt on Dr.

Martin Luther King, and they use that constantly.

And what these files would do do is just throw all that dirt back up into the air.

And they don't want to see that happen.

And not all that dirt is going to be verified as well, because the DAC was looking to find stuff.

And I'm sure it was pretty happy to put stuff in the files that it found, regardless of whether it was true or not.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Well, they do get steered back to Epstein.

So here's the rest, here's more of that conversation.

But going back to, I know I'm bouncing around here, but going back to the Epstein thing, I don't understand how they handled this so poorly, right?

For Pam Bondi to come out and talk about the files.

And then like within a blink of an eye, they come out with this bullshit Sunday night memo saying there's nothing to see.

How could they just lack of coordination?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I think it's a messaging problem is always kind of a key element of the Trump administration, whether it's this one or not.

And now, look, that's not a, you know, I'm not knocking a lot of the policies.

I like a lot of the policies that come out of this administration, this one and the previous, the first administration.

But I'm just saying, a hallmark of a Trump administration is

the ability to have a self-inflicted wound, you know, shoot yourself in the foot because of messaging usually, right?

So I think they've done it again.

And I don't see how they I don't see how they walk this back.

They're trying to, I think, with this interview with Ghelane Maxwell to say, look, we're trying.

We're talking to her.

Look at him spreading around the blame here again.

Cam Bondi, the messaging.

Is this really just a messaging issue?

Because to me, it feels like an associating with known paedophiles issue.

And they're lying about what material you have issue as as well you know they're lying about what material they have on us mike is making out all of this it's just a comms problem that's the thing comms problem off often in trump's uh

there's a comms problem and that's because comms don't come from the top orders come from the top they get interpreted by comms and put out into the world so yeah if this is a real scandal it currently has trump front and center in it but if this is just comms and messaging well it's someone in his team you know that's an issue with the administration it's someone further down the food chain who can be thrown to the wolves Yeah, and they're assuaging the guilt on Trump to try to add it to somebody else.

But watch some of the interviews that came out when they, because Trump can't keep himself off camera.

So he keeps getting questioned about this every opportunity that reporters have.

And at one point, he's talking about how he stopped talking to Epstein because he stole a towel girl from him.

And you think, like, you can't dig, like, you want to talk about a comms problem.

Stop putting that guy in front of the microphone.

There's your comms problem.

Especially when Virginia Dufrey used to work at Mar-a-Lago.

So one of the people that Epstein stole was one of the known victims.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the people who I think died by suicide eventually.

Yeah.

Like awful.

And he's the, and he brings it up.

Someone asked him and he brings it up.

Like, keep him away from the microphone.

That's probably, there's your comms problem.

I diagnosed it for you.

All right.

Epstein, more on the Epstein footage.

This is bringing Cash Patel back in.

You know, but how does Pam Bondi say we have thousands of hours of footage?

And then Cash Battelle says we don't have anything that you're looking for.

Yeah.

And then Tim Dylan said he has lunch with J.D.

Vance, and J.D.

Vance says that 10,000 hours is commercial pornography.

Right.

Yeah.

You think this freak show of Epstein wasn't like, it didn't have hidden cameras.

It wasn't taped and shit.

100%.

100%.

Well, that was the thing about that house, that house they had in New York City, which is, by the way, for sale.

Oh, really?

Yeah, nobody wants to buy it.

You want to buy Epstein's house?

Do the cameras convey?

Well, this is the thing.

I mean, you've got to gut the walls.

How are you going to know what the fuck is in there?

Yeah.

Imagine you're walking around your house naked and you think that the CIA has got, or your own, your organization.

Or whoever it is.

To be fair, they just have a lot of hours of videotape of me walking around naked.

I'm sure.

But Massad, whoever it is that was involved in this intelligence gathering.

I mean, I'm just guessing.

I have no idea.

But there's fucking pinhole cameras all over that house.

Yeah.

Maybe they took some start from that perception, right?

Because, again,

if anything else, you're just being naive if you think, no, there's nothing.

Again, you got to tam it down to the bare beams.

Yeah.

You got to strip the wall board off.

You got to fucking every baseboard, you got to pull everything.

It's like, it's like he fucking knows what's in that house.

Do you think that someone who buys a house for millions and millions, and let's say like $50 million,

do you think that they do all that work themselves?

Do you think that

it's all sweat equity they're putting into this house?

Like, are you kidding me?

If you buy a house, an entire mansion for $50 million,

how much money could it possibly be to strip it down to nothing?

What, a couple hundred thousand dollars?

That's literally nothing.

That's not even money when you're talking about buying something for $50 million.

Does he think that really happens?

What is happening?

And I just want to mention, because when I heard this, I thought, well, is Epstein's house up for sale?

Does no one want to buy it?

Does no one want to buy it?

And I looked it up and no, they all sold.

All his properties sold.

Ultimately, the house he's talking about sold for $51 million in 2021.

Epstein died in, I think it was 2019.

So it sold like two years later.

And this was, I imagine too, that the thing didn't go up right away, that his estate had to sell it.

There was also a legal thing going on where victims were suing him and they got a lot of these proceeds.

So the numbers I'll read off, a lot of this money went to his victims, but it sold for $51 million in March of 2021.

His Palm Beach house sold in 2021 for $18.5 million.

In 2023, his island sold for $60 million.

His ranch sold in August of 2023.

His Paris apartment sold in June of 2022.

As near as I could tell, none of his houses, none of the properties he owns are up for sale.

But I think what is happening is Joe is trying to, Joe hears this and immediately thinks this is proof of the conspiracy.

If no one will buy it, then that means that it's haunted, essentially.

It's a haunted property.

It's a, there's some sort of bad juju there and no one's going to buy it because of that.

And that adds to his conspiracy.

And he never bothers to even look.

And later on, he will be fact-checked by Jamie that this house is not for sale.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Completely right.

All right.

So now there's a talking about a CEO payment that went out.

And this is also another thing that jumps in and he gets an opportunity to talk about another

another sort of indication that there was some sort of conspiracy behind Jeffrey Epstein.

And so then you just kind of like, wasn't there like some CEO that had to step down because he wound up giving Epstein, it was found out that he gave Epstein like $150 million that they couldn't explain why?

Wasn't that the case, Jamie?

So it's one of those things where there's obviously value in having all these people on your side.

But when you do get all this information on these people, like what are they trying to accomplish with it?

This is the question.

Are they trying to get support for Apollo CEO to step down after firm finds more payments to Jeffrey Epstein?

$158 million.

He paid the convicted sex offender $158 million.

Can you scroll down a little bit, Jamie?

Yeah.

His plan to step down as Chief.

I've advised the Apollo board that I will retire as CEO before my

70th birthday in July, remain as chairman.

No, he's going to remain as a chairman.

New York Times detailed at least $75 million in payments and found that Mr.

Black had paid Epstein $158 million in a five-year period ending in 2017.

He also lent Mr.

Epstein more than $30 million, only $10 million of which he was paid back.

So that's a guy that they got something on here.

I love this.

Leon viewed

Epstein as a confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes.

This was after his 2008 guilty plea.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Mr.

Epstein's advice was worth, look at that, was worth perhaps $2 billion in tax savings to Mr.

Black, according to the report.

Right.

What that?

But this is, again, this is what Weinstein said.

Eric said that this like this guy is not

good.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

He wasn't a good financial advisor.

So, yeah, Joe needs to make out here that Epstein wasn't a good financial advisor.

That's what he's always heard about it.

So it's really weird that these people are in his orbit.

But do you remember when Peter Thiel talked about how he met Epstein and the way he was introduced to Epstein and why he was with why he was not friends with Epstein?

Do you remember that?

He was described as a financial genius.

This was on the August 2024 episode, and we actually covered it in a past episode of Our Show.

I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes.

And

there were probably

these complicated ways

you could structure a nonprofit organization,

especially as a way in a marital

context that

I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about.

How when you were introduced to him?

I don't think Epstein would have been able to

comment on

super string theory or something like that.

But

I think this sort of thing he might have actually been pretty expert on.

When you were introduced to him, how was he described to you?

He was described as one of the smartest tax people in the world.

Interesting.

And

it probably was my moral weakness that I had.

But how could you have known back then?

He had never been arrested.

No,

this was 2014.

It was post-arrest.

It was post-arust.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I wanted to make sure we got back in one of my favorite lines that we've discovered during this Najee Rogan, where Peter Thiel admits that all this happened after Epstein had been arrested the first time for being a paedophile.

So this was, I know he's a paedophile, but damn is he good with taxes.

But you have got Rogan being told by Peter Thiel that

Epstein was great with taxes.

So now Joe has to sort of fudge all that into, well, he wasn't good with taxes.

So why did all these people want to hang out with him?

It can't have been his taxing because Eric, my boy Eric, says that he wasn't very good with taxes at all.

Yeah.

And I think that that, again, this is one of those moments of cherry-picking, right?

He knows somebody who, and I don't know Eric's qualifications, right?

Eric and Brett are both academics.

So I don't know what their qualifications are to judge whether or not someone else is good in this field, but he's listening to Eric Weinstein because it matches what he wants.

So it confirms his biases.

This to him says, well, there's no reason anyone would actually pay Epstein.

The only reason someone would actually pay Epstein is if they were in his pocket because they were committing the same crimes as him and Epstein filmed him in his pinhole cameras through his house.

That's the only reason that someone would do this because Joe has already constructed the narrative and he can't be broken out of it.

So whatever he hears is going to confirm his biases.

Even when the person across from him reads a line from a story that I will link in the show notes that literally says they saved him $2 billion in taxes.

This person, that's a great return on investment, by the way.

If I could have 158 million and I can turn that into 2 billion, that's kind of amazing.

So the essentially, there's a reason why you would pay someone that kind of money if they could save you that kind of money.

Now, I'm not absolving this person who was with him.

And if something comes out that they were paying each other for something, I wouldn't be surprised.

But that doesn't mean that you should believe it when there is an answer there that you're completely willing to pass over to fit your own narrative.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to hate this guy, you don't have to believe he's a paedophile.

You could just accept the fact that he paid $158 million to avoid paying $2 million in taxes.

That's a good enough reason to hate somebody for skiffing out on taxes that much and stiffing the public.

You're 100% right, Marsh.

So here's a clip that talks about Tulsi Gabbard and her investigation into Obama and what it really was, was a distraction away from those Epstein files.

So I think they should have maybe just made this more factual-based, stayed away from the, you know, the sort of the hyperbolic statements about treason and all the rest of it, and then

tried to explain it to the American public in a way that they can digest a little bit better.

Right.

But when you throw out things like treasonous conspiracy, once again, much like with the Epstein thing, you're creating this kind of howling mob that's going to expect something.

And I just don't know that they're going to get it.

Right.

So do you think that it's possible that she was encouraged to do this because this kind of takes away some of the heat off of the Epstein thing?

I'm sure that was a thought process in there somewhere.

Yeah.

Possibly.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable assumption.

Look, it's an important issue, right?

If you have the Intel community or you have

the White House

deciding to themselves, look, we know this information is kind of bullshit, but it certainly serves a narrative, which is we want to delegitimize the new president that's coming in because we can't stand him,

then that's a really, really serious problem that needs to be examined.

It's also so short-sighted because do you not know that that information is eventually going to come out that's going to compromise the confidence that people have in anything that the intelligence agencies put forth after that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so if you listen there, look how fast Joe just completely moves past that bit about Gabbard being told to release this stuff about Obama, which isn't necessarily true.

It's kind of bullshit, but release it anyway, being told by the White House to do that in order to take the heat off Epstein.

He just kind of skirts straight past that.

He doesn't really seem to care about that at all.

He asks, and in a way, that is a good question, right?

In a way, that's a good question to be like, well, is this, do you think that this is a thing?

And then immediately, he just, he essentially just reaches behind Joe's ear and pulls out a coin and then he flips it and Joe immediately follows the coin.

Yeah, he does it throughout the whole episode too.

He keeps pulling cards out from behind Joe's ear and they're always Joe's card.

And then he's like, oh my gosh, and he's blown away by this magic trick and he doesn't follow up with what could be good questions throughout the entire episode.

Yeah, and that's because Joe is willing at every stage, he's desperate at every stage to buy the distraction, to take the bait, and to take the heat off Trump for the Epstein thing and to put it on anybody else.

So, any opportunity to move away from a tricky question, he'll take every single time.

And now they're going to move on.

They were talking about the Epstein thing, but they are going to shift their focus to talk about Joe Biden and his cancer.

But I think, so yeah, so the Biden,

let's call it a cover-up.

That's, again, it's an example of

how people are not more upset about that, right?

I mean,

again, with the idea that we've got ADHD and everybody's moving on, but you would imagine that that story, if none other, right?

Because it's not quite as complicated as

the Intel issue or even as the Epstein files.

It's pretty straightforward.

People hiding the condition of the leader of the free world.

So anyway,

it's just a thought.

I'm surprised that it's gone away.

Trevor Burrus: Well, then there's the Autopen as well.

That's another wild thing.

Yeah.

Because

so many of these people that were pardoned were pardoned by Autopen.

And so you have to, it begs the question, like, how was that negotiated?

Like, who was involved in that?

Who made those decisions?

What was their motivation?

Were they compensated?

And look, look, he says the former President Biden says he was advised on all of this.

He was in on all of these.

And the auto-pen was primarily used for

sort of rote pardons,

collective pardons where they're pardoning

for an action.

And so you have a number of people included in that that you're giving pardons to.

But

all of this, whether it's that, whether it's any of the other things we've been talking about, at the end of the day, it's no wonder.

Look, people's confidence level in politicians and government institutions and the media is at an all-time low, right?

And I think that's a really dangerous thing, but I don't see how you walk the dog back on that, right?

I mean, how do you do that?

So you see what they're talking about here is that Biden's cancer, the cover-up of Biden's cancer, that's the real issue here.

You can see Mike even saying, you know, oh, we all move on from stories.

Why isn't anyone more upset about that?

We've all got ADHD and we're not focusing on the real issues.

Don't think about the Trump and the Epstein thing.

We should be talking about Biden's cancer thing.

But okay, yeah, he's talking about there was a big thing that they covered up and we shouldn't be moving on.

First of all, I'd say, as Trump supporters, they shouldn't really be so quick to talk about or comment on which stories

shouldn't be moved on from so quickly because their guy instituted a coup and we're not talking about that anymore.

If somebody tried to overthrow the American government, I would argue you shouldn't move on past that quite so quickly as to elect the same guy four years later.

That's a bad idea.

But really, what we're seeing here is these are things to distract from talking about Trump and Epstein.

And Joe rolls straight from the Biden cancer distraction.

And okay, it's a big story.

Don't get me wrong.

That is a big story.

I don't think it's as big as the current president doing what he can to hide the fact that he was very good associates with a paedophile.

I think that's a bigger issue, not least because he's the current president and Biden isn't.

But Joe just moves straight from that one into putting forward the use of an autopen as a cover-up or a scandal, which it isn't, it's very routine.

But at this point, Joe is just mainlining Republican talking points and distractions and then regurgitating them into his listeners' mouths like he's a mummy bird eating the baby birds at this point.

Which of this, we're an hour into the conversation.

Which these distractions should I feed you all next?

Because we shouldn't be thinking about Trump and Epstein.

And we're an hour on from, isn't it funny that South Park came for Trump?

And now we're on, we shouldn't be blaming Trump.

Actually, it's the comms team.

Actually, it's the people around him.

Actually, the real scandal is elsewhere.

And Mike ends by saying, and it's a dangerous thing because people have like record low levels of confidence in government institutions and politicians.

Well, again, why might people have such a low level of confidence?

It might have something to do with a decade of your guy calling the media the enemy, calling all of his opponents corrupt, and then hiring billionaires to dismantle the government in the name of efficiency.

And lo and behold, parts of the government no longer work.

Like you can say that it's dangerous that people have no confidence in politicians and the government, but

the policies that you have been championing, because Mike even said, you know, there's things he does wrong, but I love his policies.

His policies are causing these things to, causing the people to have less confidence in politicians and the government.

But again, they don't have that level of self-reflection because they're all in on the team, unfortunately.

You know, what's really interesting is Trump's tactics throughout his entire media career as a politician, he has always used gaslighting as a way in which to try to get away from anything that anyone could try to pin on him.

So people would say

he said something and then he would gaslight to try to manipulate everybody.

And even though he was outright lying to people, it worked every single time.

There was never really anything you could do because there was a constant media dust up about Trump.

And then we would move on.

The problem with this is gaslighting doesn't work when you're trying to talk about a conspiracy because people expect it.

So there's no way he can gaslight around this to be like, I don't know him.

I didn't know him.

I barely knew him.

Oh, he stole a girl from me one time.

I don't really know him, whatever.

And he keeps saying the same things over and over, but that just feeds the conspiracy more.

So the tactics he's used throughout his entire career don't actually work on this particular thing that he is the one who stoked the fire on.

So it's actually backfiring on him because he doesn't know how to react to this because all he's used to doing is lying.

And all people hearing it are expecting is a lie.

And so it just keeps on.

It's just, it's like a firestorm.

It can't stop itself.

Yeah, I think, I think that's true.

The other thing he does is the distraction.

And we're seeing all these attempted distractions all the way through this interview.

But the problem with the distraction is like when you have a dog and the dog wants to eat something that it shouldn't be eating, you can distract it with the treat, but that only works if the treat is of higher value than the thing it wants to eat.

Yeah.

None of this stuff is higher value, not Biden's cancer, not the idea of Obama being treasonless, not the MLK files.

None of these are higher value treats than what's in the Epstein files and what relationship do you have to Trump.

Yeah.

There's more distractions here.

He's he's now he's asking, why aren't they paying attention to all the great things that Trump has done?

Good things that are happening, the closing of the border is clearly a good thing.

That was fucking scary and dangerous.

Yeah, no, from look, from a policy perspective, look, the other day they had

like nine crossings, right?

Nine, right, compared to maybe 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 a day in the previous administration.

So

that's a huge win.

And that's what they should be talking about.

And they should be talking about

the trade deals, right?

They've got a good trade deal with Japan.

They've got a good trade deal with Indonesia.

They've got a good trade deal with Vietnam.

They've signed one with the UK.

They're getting ready for the European Union.

There's things that they should be talking about.

And instead, once again, we're consumed with what we've been discussing epstein and the intel manipulation you know i mean you're thinking biden's condition and obama treason yeah yeah yeah so it's it's really it's it's disappointing but

yeah i mean stop talking about the president being best friends with a pedophile we've got a new trade deal that we've announced on slightly less favorable terms after we shot on our allies why aren't we celebrating that yeah why aren't we why are we celebrating that we're taxing the american people through tariffs why why aren't we celebrating that thing um you know look

the one thing that they bring up here that really upsets me is when they talk about the numbers of people that cross the border yeah yeah one of the things that they're that they're saying is it was so dangerous to have an open border that's not true that was never true there wasn't an open border but also they're talking about people that are seeking asylum so these people come to our border looking for someplace to be that's less that's less dangerous than where they came from.

And we, he said it was down to nine.

That means that people from outside the United States that are

experiencing hardship see the United States as a less safe place than where they were experiencing hardship.

And that's a terrible fucking tragedy.

And we shouldn't be celebrating that.

Joe thinks it's all criminals and MS-13 that's entering into the borders.

And that's just not true.

A lot of these people that we have numbers for, right?

Because people enter in illegally constantly and they're still doing it, right?

Because you don't know the people who come in illegally.

They don't come in and take a number like a butcher count.

The people that you can count, those people are coming in before what we call legally.

And a lot of those people, a vast majority of them are asylum seekers.

Yeah, essentially what they're saying is we should celebrate the fact that we are helping fewer people than ever before.

USA, USA, USA.

Exactly.

So now they're going to talk about how you should or shouldn't believe some of the videos that come out because of possible AI manipulation.

Well, in terms of driving narratives or telling stories or getting people to think a certain way, I mean, think about how simple that is now from a hostile element, right?

Like if I'm working Russian propaganda for the FSB, how easy is it now for me to create a clip

of whatever, let's take a hot topic, right?

And suddenly you've created a clip where Trump is talking about, you know, being in the Epstein files or

somebody around Biden's circle is talking about how they covered up his mind.

People will see that.

They'll release it, right?

People will see it.

They're not going to necessarily question whether it's, because that's not how people work, right?

They see shit on the internet and they go, oh, yeah, I'm going to send that to my buddy.

And yeah, you got some people who might be more cynical than others, but for the most part, people just eat that shit up.

To be honest, look, you don't even need AI for this.

You just don't.

We've seen like Joe asking questions that he's not bothered looking at the answers for.

You don't need that.

All you'll really need, as we'll see in the undercard, is libs of TikTok to add some fairly shitty commentary to a screenshot, and Joe will then broadcast it to 20 million followers without bothering to check.

You don't need AI and sophistication when your audience is so motivated to believe what you want to be true.

Absolutely.

And then they'll take clips out of context, which we will show in our undercard as well.

All right, this last piece here is

talking about the government release of the video and how there's pieces of it removed.

And so, which is also shows you the incompetence of the government that they release that video from the cell that's got two minutes and 53 seconds removed because these aren't the best people in the world that are doing that.

No, no, and that's a that I mean, there's yeah,

you could argue that the on the hostile side, on the on the

whatever you want to call them, the hackers or people on the cutting edge of doing things and using this technology for nefarious purposes.

I'm not saying the government doesn't have good quality people doing it, but you tend to have cutting edge folks

on the hostile team.

Yeah, they're not going to be working for the State Department.

No,

they're going to make money other ways.

I love when he talks about the incompetence of the government because he knows the people in government.

They've been on his show.

Lords of McCash Patel, Tulsi Garbard, half the cabinet have been on his show.

Pete Hexeth, people like that have all been on his show.

But he's talking about, well, the government is incompetent, but not by name, because he actually knows the people in there.

So it's this kind of ephemeral group of incompetents, but not the ones that I actually know who are great guys, and it's so good that they got in.

Yeah.

Yeah, they actually used me as a reference on their resume because

I'm the guy who got them the job.

Yeah.

All right, we're going to take a short break and then we're going to move on to our undercard.

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Well, it's just factually inaccurate on so many different levels.

I don't understand why you wrote it like that.

So, for the undercard this week, I had actually already planned for us to cover what is a really transphobic conversation that they have in the middle of this interview.

They actually go into trans stuff a little bit here and there.

There's a section on it.

And Joe spreads a very well-debunked piece of misinformation about how

trans people have taken 900 medals off cis female athletes and it's been completely debunked yeah yeah and then he also mentions that a gold medalist in boxing has to give back their medal and that's not even true it's like literally not even true yeah so i i'd literally i literally had planned all that out as the meme goes i'd planned all that out i closed my notes i took a sip of coffee and i opened up my podcast player to see who joe had interviewed on that specific day and it was graham linehan the uh comedy writer from ireland who has spent eight years being incredibly transphobic online and sort of harassing various trans people and things.

So we're not going to do the transphobia stuff today.

We're going to go deep into misinformation about trans people as the main event for next week and we're going to cover that.

So instead, as a change of gears, we're going to look this time as the undercard at essentially how Joe acts in this interview as a clearinghouse for right-wing propaganda, including coming straight from libs of TikTok, and then how he essentially pivots this conversation about the blame for Epstein and the Epstein scandal, and that pivots all of that blame onto the Atlantic, PBS, and NPR, you know, the real people behind Epstein.

All right.

So this, this first clip is essentially them talking about Epstein, but then it shifts.

And so that's a great way to shift into the ender card.

So here's that first clip.

Here's one of my favorite ones.

I'm going to send you this, Jamie, because this, somebody tweeted this, and it's just so perfect.

And it just shows you how crazy this whole thing has been from the very beginning.

This is

someone tweeted this from the Atlantic.

And this is what's funny about this.

Check this out, James.

So it's these fucking people.

It's like they all knew her.

They all knew him.

So many people knew him and knew her.

And they're all pretending that they didn't.

No one knew it.

Check this out.

This is the Atlantic says.

Go up, Beggar, so we can see it.

So we can see the quote below it.

Below it.

No, go back.

There we go.

I can't read it.

There it goes.

This is what the Atlantic posts.

If the Epstein scandal teaches us anything, it's that America needs a dedicated and decently funded group of people whose job it is not to just ask questions, but to find answers.

And then this guy, Sean Davis, posts, the woman on the right is Ghelane Maxwell.

She trafficked children for Jeffrey Epstein.

The woman on the left owns your magazine.

This is so fucking wild.

Epstein.

Just that alone is so wild that they would have the balls to post that.

We need dedicated journalists, not just people asking questions, which is like, for sure, an attack on podcasts.

Like, listen, you guys didn't do

shit.

You didn't do shit.

So just asking, just the fact that we're just asking questions along with that, or is this a knock on the defunding of PBS, which is essentially a propaganda network for the Democratic Party?

Yeah, so essentially, yeah, the real issue here is that the PBS and Atlantic did too little to investigate Epstein.

That's the real thing we should be caring about.

That's definitely more of an issue than the president being on record as being very close friends with Epstein and talking about how they have certain things in common and how they have another wonderful secret together.

But no, at the first opportunity, seven minutes into the conversation, and Joe is already already starting to pivot this conversation to the problem here is Atlanta the person from Atlantic knew Ghelain Maxwell what we should really be asking here why is Joe so keen to shift the blame to shift the focus when he starts out South Park have come for Trump isn't it hilarious isn't it so great that they did this isn't it so brave isn't it wonderful six minutes after that he's now on the Atlantic owner actually knew Ghelain Maxwell so you know maybe that's the real issue here yeah it's so crazy that a rich and powerful person hung out with another rich and powerful person.

Like, why is that even what is that?

Especially that Epstein and Maxwell, their entire MO was to ingratiate themselves to other rich and powerful people.

It's what they did, go out of their way to recruit these people to essentially groom those people as well.

And some of them were complicit in that grooming, and others were people who would have been sort of flattered and love bombed by the attention.

But if what Joe's point here is being in a photograph with Ghelain Maxwell or Jeffrey Epstein is a scandal and is part of a major issue that's worthy of investigation.

Do we need to bring up the pictures of Musk with Ghelane Maxwell?

Do we need to bring up the many-footed piece of video of Trump with Epstein?

Those things don't invalidate Trump or Musk because Joe likes them.

But one picture with the Atlantic, well, that invalidates The Atlantic and PBS and anybody else who'd have to weigh in on Ghelane Maxwell here.

Yeah, that's a great point, Marsh.

You have to twist yourself into like a logic pretzel in order to get to that point.

You know, there is a lot of footage, like you suggest, and a lot of photos of Trump with Maxwell and with Epstein.

And he's not mentioning this at all.

This isn't a gotcha.

And also just genuinely, like 30 seconds ago in the tape.

Now, granted, we're an hour into this program, but we played the clip where he talked about Cash Patel and how he sicked his audience on them because he didn't want to ask that because he doesn't have any kind of rigor at all in interviews.

And here he is saying, well, what's wrong with podcasts?

Well, what's wrong with podcasts, Joe, is that you expect your audience to be the one to go and ask those questions, not you.

Yeah, exactly.

The Atlantic aren't saying to the readers, could you go off and ask questions about this, please?

They're asking the paying journalists to ask those questions and to write down their answers.

Okay, so now we're going to start talking about NPR.

And there's several clips on this.

Did I send you that thing where this guy was breaking, did I say NPR or PBS earlier?

I meant NPR.

Did I send you that thing, that link where this guy's breaking down all all the different tweets that the lady who is the CEO of NPR made?

Because she's getting questioned on whether or not she's biased.

And then this guy goes over all the different tweets.

God damn it, I know I saved it, but I should have been prepared.

I know I have it in here because it's so funny.

It's so funny listening to her.

See if you can find it.

You might be able to find it.

But it's found it beautiful.

Because it's so adorable.

This pretending that this was an unbiased news source.

Yes.

Directly from her own account.

Well, this is one of them, but let's.

But this one guy broke it down.

Sorry.

Maybe I sent it to Dave Smith.

We'll find it.

Yeah.

But again,

anybody who at this stage of the game thinks that the media

doesn't have an agenda, that they're not complicit in one way or another with whatever may be.

Come on.

Yeah, it's a joke.

It's a joke.

And they're all funded.

And I mean, the fact that the government was funding NPR is crazy.

Like,

you can't have a completely biased, one-sided media organization that's funded by the government and taxpayers.

That's crazy.

And they went over all the amount of people that were on NPR that were Democrats, and it's 100%.

It's like out of 87 people, it's 100%.

Look at the New York Times.

First of all, I want to point out, you're 10 minutes in.

You haven't done the prep to set up the first thing you're going to be talking about.

This is incredibly stoppy.

Get an editor.

Do something, man.

But anyway,

it feels like Joe has quite a specific glee in his voice when he's talking about the ceo lady now the thing is i don't know that he'd be talking about the ceo man the the ceo man or the ceo gentleman if it was a guy who's a ceo but the fact that it's a female ceo he's got a specific glee in his voice ceo lead ceo yeah ceo lady and i think it's worth us noting when that happens because otherwise you sort of miss the undercurrent of dismissal of women in here but it's amazing to me that we're 10 minutes in he opens talking about trump and south park then he goes through a whole bit about uh trump and Epstein.

And we have pivoted into

the thing about this Epstein scandal is the real issue is the liberal funding of NPR.

That's what's taking a hit here.

That's where we are 10 minutes in.

It feels like Joe is desperately trying to do anything other than talk about the real scandal on Epstein here.

Yeah, I appreciate that you bring up that CEO lady point.

I really do, Marsh, because

I think there is something there.

I think Joe enjoys watching videos of women being put in their place.

I think that that is true.

I have seen him with enough glee in his voice, as you suggest, watching women get, quote, put in their place to make me think

there's definitely some serious misogyny going on in this program.

I also want to talk about a line that he says.

He says, they're all funded.

This is the highest paid podcaster in podcasting talking about how much money someone else or how much money someone else is bringing in.

I've never heard anyone question Joe's motivations, even though he is the highest paid podcaster in podcasting.

That might be something somebody needs to look into.

What things can he talk and not talk about?

All right.

NPR again.

NPR relied on tax money, and there's this giant outrage that the government's going to defund it.

Well, a lot of, and what they're trying to do is they're trying to couch it as saying, look, you're taking away, you know, the only source of news for, you know, rural locations, for example.

Like you got some place up in North Dakota that, you know, has no other access, and so they rely on NPR for their news.

I don't know a lot of people up in North Dakota that say, I wonder what NPR is saying about this.

Well, not just that, but it's like

at the end of the day, the reality is the Internet exists.

And

you don't need to publicly fund something that's clearly biased when the Internet exists.

You can get whatever you want.

If you want to just absorb and consume only left-wing media, there's so much available.

You can go find it.

But our tax dollars should not be going to that.

No, no.

We talked, he had,

he was talking about how they were trying to get internet to rural areas and they were shitting on it because it was a Biden thing that Biden planned to do.

And it was taking a long time because getting permits and doing and sort of getting the thing off the ground does take a long time.

People need to remember that even in this day and age, the internet is still a privileged thing.

It's not something everyone has complete and unlimited access to.

Sure, do rich people have have it all the time and whenever they want it on every single device?

Yes, that's absolutely true.

Does everyone have that access?

No, they don't.

And so when he says people in North Dakota don't have access to news, well, maybe they might not have access to the internet like you have access to the internet.

Stop pretending that your privilege is ubiquitous.

And, you know, one of the things I did want to say too, because he's like, we didn't just have this biased show.

And it's like, yeah, man, the internet isn't biased at all, Joe.

He's telling them the alternative is go to the internet.

And it's like, yeah, the internet is a bias machine, bro.

It will literally serve you results based on your own biases.

Yeah, that's true.

And also, I just, I think it just isn't true that there is a deluge of left-wing media.

There's a deluge of right-wing media.

You can sort of look across the media landscape and there's a huge number of like right-wing outlets because it's quite easy to back a free market approach to media when you are right-wing, largely because there's money to be made in right-wing fear.

You know, look at how many figures get rich in the right-wing media sphere.

We cover some of them on this show, but then there's people like Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro,

Dave Rubens

on the right making more money like that, Tim Poole.

We could go on for a long time naming people who independently got famous and wealthy.

And I say independently in that they work with a media company.

Sometimes it's not independent because they are taking secondhand money from Russia in order to get famous and wealthy.

You can't do the same with left-wing voices.

There There just aren't as many of them at all.

There aren't any, as far as I can think of, left-wing media empires that got mega-rich off left-wing news.

Ironically, the closest thing that comes to mind as someone who was an incredibly wealthy owner of a very left-wing or a fairly left-wing media outlet, who at least had arguable left-wing credentials, was Robert Maxwell, Ghillaine Maxwell's dad.

I mean, I don't want him on the team, but this is all about full transparency.

He was a labor MP in the UK due in the 1960s, and he bought and owned the Daily Mirror newspaper, which was a left-wing tabloid.

So he saw himself as part of the labor movement, at least for most of his life.

So he's the closest I could think of to a guy who was mega wealthy and left, and at least from a media perspective, on the left wing, but you don't find many of those.

Yeah.

Thankfully, because he was a terrible guy.

What's interesting is there's a constant, I've heard this many times that reality has a left-wing bias, that like the people on the left-wing will very often have a, have reality as the thing that they're trying to put out into the world.

And there's a spin that happens the other way.

And I think that's something you have to remind yourself constantly is that reality does have a left-wing bias and that also doesn't sell as well.

Yeah, reality has the left-wing bias.

Commerciality has a right-wing bias.

And that is a problem for funding the news.

Yeah.

Now they're going to talk about this video that they finally finally find this thing and then they play part of it on the on the show.

Did you find it?

Let's hear it.

Show me a story.

Sorry, it concerns you.

That's fantastic.

As far as the accusations that we're biased, I would stand up and say, please show me a story that concerns you because we want to know and we want to bring that conversation back to our newsroom.

And then they have all these

fat phobia and its racist past and present.

Some white people may choose thumbs up because it feels neutral, but some academics argue that opting out, what does that mean?

Thumbs up signals lacks awareness about white privilege, akin to society associating whiteness with being racist.

What?

God.

What does that mean?

How about how racism became a marketing tool for country music?

Oh, yeah, that's a good one.

God.

This right-wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think.

No, that's like

literally.

And here's another great quote that she said, if you look on the right side, Jamie, where it says the truth is a distraction from getting things done.

That is such a fucking Orwellian thing to say.

Click on that just so you can hear her say this.

Because it's so bananas that someone would say this out loud and not think it's.

One of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren't actually focused on finding the truth.

Oh, no.

They're working for something that's a little bit more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now.

And after seven years there, I actually believe that they're onto something.

But for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth isn't necessarily the best place to start.

In fact, I think our reverence for the truth

might have become

a bit of a distraction.

that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.

What?

Oh my God.

That's fantastic.

How wild is that?

And you want government money.

That is such a wild thing to say.

You know, going for the truth as a journalist?

No, no.

It's not important.

No, it's not important.

It's not a distraction.

The truth is a distraction.

So there's a lot going on in this, and we're going to take some time to unpack all of this.

First of all, I'll point out that Joe was just talking about how NPR has this liberal bias.

It's 100% Democrats on there.

And it's just essentially the, I think he calls it the the Democrats propaganda machine.

The tweet that he's reading out here, accusing NPR of bias is from Libs of TikTok.

Now, Libs of TikTok is a right-wing propagandist account that farms the liberal internet for anything it can take out of context and portray as being ridiculous when shared either without any further information or when shared with snarky context that reframes it.

But almost inevitably, almost, not fully inevitably, but almost inevitably, or often the case is, when you actually look at the context, it's a lot less ridiculous.

So I figured, let's do that.

So let's go through the stories that Joe cites.

Okay, let's do those.

All right.

So the first one he cites is, which skin color emojis should you use?

The answer can be more complex than you think.

That's a title of an NPR article.

Yeah, and it sounds ridiculous.

So why would emojis have anything to do with racism?

Well, there's a quote in here from this article.

Some white people may choose thumbs up because it feels neutral.

That's the yellow thumbs up.

But

some academics argue that opting out of putting a thumbs thumbs up with a race tone to it signals a lack of awareness about white privilege akin to society associating whiteness with being raceless.

And the point here is using the yellow thumbs up rather than the one with the real skin color might seem like you're being neutral.

I'm not picking a skin color.

I'm just picking the yellow one.

But the article quotes Zara Rahman, who's a researcher and writer in Berlin, who argues that the skin tone emojis make white people confront their race as people of color have to do.

For example, she said, she said, someone's confusion when someone who is white uses a brown emoji.

So she asked some friends about it.

And someone said, well, one friend who was white told me that it's because he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using.

So that he was using a brown emoji instead.

So we want to kind of try and even out the playing field.

Raman said, for me, it does signal a kind of lack of awareness about your white privilege.

What it's saying here is we can go for the yellow emojis because we assume that we are the default.

So we don't need to deviate from that.

So actually, my hand is white.

Whereas people who are people of color are more likely to have to identify their own color because they're more aware of their race and more aware of kind of the symbolism of that.

Well, you could say that's untrue.

You could say you disagree with it.

You could say that's overthinking it.

But I don't think you can say that on the face of it, even writing an article about this is so ridiculous, you should defund the entire station over it.

Exactly.

Yeah,

it brings me back to the idea of all the people in the back in the back in sort of Bush's days that used to say, I don't see color.

I don't see people.

I don't see your color.

I don't see your color.

And that's just not true.

And it also, what it does is devalue the person who happens to live that experience.

It devalues their opinion.

It makes it, makes it seem like what they're saying is trivial because you don't see color.

Well, that's a shitty way to go through the world because you do see color all the time.

And now you're telling people not to talk about it.

Yeah, what you're saying is you don't see color.

And that's because you've never had to.

You've never been seen as

not a moment.

So here's another one, Marsh.

Fat phobia and its racist past and present.

Okay, so tying fat phobia and racism together.

This is pure,

you know, libs of TikTok stuff.

This is pure bait for Rorgan, but obviously this is ridiculous.

Well, when you read the article, it's actually a short podcast piece.

It's a piece looking at how racist, like racist articles from the 18th and 19th century shamed white women into eating less and being less curvacious.

And part of the reason for that is because it was getting harder and harder to distinguish them from the help who were women of color.

When everyone's the same shape, from a distance, you can't quite tell, especially when skin color was no longer adequate in their mind to tell the difference between the good people and the help.

Because 200 years of people living alongside each other, there were a lot more biracial people for some good reasons and also some not good reasons as to why there were a lot of biracial people coming up from places where there were people of color as servants.

Now, the preferences then for women to be skinnier, to have less curves, was influenced by being able to therefore separate them out and be able to show racial superiority.

Like we're white women, you can tell that we have a different shape.

That's how we're totally different from these more baser people, is how they were talking about it.

These baser people who indulge themselves on carnal desires like food, like sex, things like that.

We are superior, we're not savages.

This is the mentality they were talking about in this article.

And those

preferences at the time, they were still fashionable when modern medicine was taking off and got codified into some of the assumptions that doctors of the day were making about optimal health.

Well, what is the right BMI?

What's the right

height and weight?

Well, let's take an average of what people are and that's going to show you a bell curve.

But if that bell curve is already skewed around the assumptions you're putting in in order to be able to distinguish people more clearly, then those things get codified.

Now, again, you can disagree with some of that if you want.

You could say that it's maybe kind of reaching in some places or that you'd need stronger evidence.

I don't think you could say that it's completely laughable if you actually read it or listened to the podcast.

Joe didn't do that and neither did Libs of TikTok.

They trolled for a headline with the word race in it and then just pulled it up to take the piss out of it.

All right.

Next one.

How racism became a marketing tool for country music.

Yeah, we're seeing a theme here about it's all about the racism.

We have to be bringing race into it.

So this was an article that was talking about in the wake of, do you know that a country song, try that in a small town?

Yeah, I did.

It was a country song opposing the blm movement like well you can have your blm movement in cities but try and do that in a small town it's kind of me paraphrasing the song yeah yeah um so this in the wake of that song becoming popular this piece looked at the history of country music and basically country music as a genre was largely invented for marketing reasons it was a marketing construct of the 1920s prior to that time people listened to basically the same type of music in america's south they'd listened to the same sort of music regardless of whether you're white or black you were listening to the music that was around that was kind of going on.

But when recording was taking off, it was happening under Jim Crawler's.

So white artists couldn't record with black artists and couldn't use the same facilities and various things like that.

So the industry split down racial lines for what were basically the same types of songs.

So the songs being played by white people were marketed as like hillbilly music, old-time music, which then evolved into country music.

And the songs by black people were marketed in a different way to a different audience and had its own sort of

evolution along the years.

So literally, without racism and marketing, there wouldn't have been that fork in the road that led to country music evolving from those kind of old

genres of music.

I think that's genuinely interesting if you actually read it and think about it.

And again, you could say, I dispute some of the details, or the evolution isn't a straight fork and there's cross-pollination and various things like that.

And that country music has its own kind of heart into it.

And it's not all about the marketing.

You can have all those opinions.

What you can't say is this is a ridiculous thing to even consider writing writing about.

Well, and I mean, every one we've read and the ones we will continue to read, every single one is a clickbait.

And that's what we've turned the internet into.

So everything's clickbait.

And they made a clickbait headline and you got mad about it.

Yeah.

The right-wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think.

Okay, so this specifically was from a part of NPR called Code Switch, which the host describes that Code Switch is all about the race beat.

That's what they say.

Their beat is racial issues.

And they talked about how there was a protest from Dutch farmers about kind of the taxes and levies and things being put on Dutch farmers for a while.

It was a big talking point in the far-right sphere that we need to support the Dutch farmers.

And it included in this podcast a speech from a far-right populist who led a far-right party in the Netherlands called Thierry Border.

And in that, he talks about having to eat mealworms rather than being allowed to produce meat because of the methane emissions from cattle.

So because of the climate, we're going to, because of climate change being fake, but we're being forced because of CO2 to stop producing cattle and eating red meat.

Instead, we're going to have to eat mealworms.

Those claims were picked up, and this is what is talked about in this article, in this podcast, in this discussion.

Those claims were picked up and amplified by Tucker Carlton.

Oh, they're coming for your steaks and they're going to feed you bugs instead.

And then the Daily Wire.

And the Daily Wire covered this by having someone on who was saying, I don't want to live like a peasant in the middle of some jungle in Vietnam.

I want to live like a civilized person with a cultural inheritance.

I'm not going to eat the bugs.

And from there, you will eat the bugs became a meme on 4chan about how

the evil people out there, the big kind of elites, are going to force you to eat the bugs against your will.

And that was being pushed on 4chan by people whose next to their name, next to their IDs on 4chan, had literal Nazi flags and white supremacist flags.

So is it therefore ridiculous to say the right-wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think think when it gets to 4chan and Nazi flags and someone saying if you live in Vietnam, you're not a civilized person with a cultural inheritance.

I think it's a very fair headline and a very worthwhile thing to cover.

Even if you don't want to read it or listen to it, Joe, you don't have to.

Yeah.

Okay, here's another one.

Kamala Harris already faces racism and sexism from Trump and Republicans.

Yeah, so this was a piece from July 2024.

And all it did was simply document instances where, for example, Trump claimed that Kamalo wasn't born in America, which she was.

And the only reason you would think that is racism.

And also, multiple Republican congressmen, it covers in this article, had called Harris a DEI hire or a DEI vice president, implying that someone who was a former senator and a California attorney general and a qualified lawyer and things wasn't sufficiently qualified to pick up any of those roles and that she was only picked to fulfill a diversity, equity, inclusion quotient.

The article also spoke to someone called Ange Marie, who said the hateful language and imagery used to describe Harris only gets worse in more conservative circles, quote, some things can get particularly dark and really draw upon some of the most pernicious stereotypes of African-American and Asian-American women, sometimes very sexualized images, unquote.

I think this is a fair thing to cover about the person who was running for president at the time if you've got documented evidence of her being treated in clearly a racist way.

Yeah, if you were paying any attention at all, you heard all the racism and sexism come out during that.

I mean, gosh, they had a constant stream of those people talking about how she essentially slept her way to the top, how she,

how she's a DEI hire.

You heard that.

Hell, you heard that from the Republican National Convention.

This is the least shocking headline amongst them.

Yeah.

Next and the final one.

There is no neutral.

Nice white people can still be complicit in a racist society.

Okay, so this was a 2020 interview, podcast interview that had been summarized into some excerpts with Robin DiAngelo, who wrote White Fragility, and who obviously at around that time was becoming something of a punching bag for the anti-war movement that was kind of taking off online and things.

And in this interview, she points out a number of different things, but one of them is that it's too comfortable for her as a white person to live and exist in a racist society.

If you're in a racist society and you're white, your life is actually pretty comfortable.

You're not confronted by that racist society or

the ways in which other people are limited.

And so it can be quite easy for you to move through that.

And so change won't happen to society until it becomes uncomfortable for even white people to live in racist societies.

That's what she's talking about here.

And she advises that people start to think about what it means to be white, because a lot of white people have never, ever been forced to actually think about the impact of their race and what race they are.

Whereas people of color in majority white nations have to think about that all the time or it comes up all the time.

All the time.

Joe could say all of that is overreacting.

He might think all of it is over sensitive.

I disagree with him on both those things, but he's welcome to say those things.

But what I think he can't say is that this is so ridiculous that it's laughable on the face of it.

I don't think he can say that.

And the reason that he is laughing at it is because he's just seen the headline and how it's been presented out of context.

Exactly.

Exactly right.

So all of those headlines came in a two-minute segment.

And in it, Joe picks up seven stories from NPR spanning four years.

And they're being highlighted by a far-right propagandist, you know, Libs of TikTok, as evidence why

public service broadcasting, public broadcasting is broken and needs to be like needs to be dismantled.

And Joe is taking all of that and he's amplifying that to a huge audience.

And in doing so, he's accepting the framing from Libs of TikTok wholly.

He's not bothering to read any of those articles, to even think about them.

He's just seeing the way that Libs of TikTok are presenting those headlines and he and his buddy are laughing about it and sending the message to a massive audience.

These are ridiculous things.

And the thing is, I think there are some interesting stuff.

There are some interesting topics, some interesting ideas being raised in these articles.

I think there are, but I can see someone else wouldn't be interested.

Somebody else would think those articles aren't for me.

But they are six or seven stories, six stories, and we'll come to a TED Talk as well.

Are those evidence, those six stories in a TED Talk, evidence that NPR needs to be dismantled?

Six stories across four years.

So I checked, right?

NPR published an average of 1,600 news articles per month between March and May of this year.

So in three months, on average, 1,600 per month.

Scale that up over the four years span of these articles.

There are 77,000 stories published by NPR in that time.

And Joe and Libs at TikTok are looking at six of them,

which is 0.0078% of the output of NPR on which he is making the judgment.

Wow.

It is totally fine that NPR is crazy and needs to be defunded.

This is a propagandist move.

It's wholly a propagandist movement.

He's accepting that propagandist, mainstreaming it, and just amplifying it out to a much more mainstream audience.

And then in it, the clip that we heard as well, it's shared on Twitter, a 45-second clip taken from a TED talk.

It's shared by End Wokeness,

another right-wing propagandist.

And I'm not saying those terms loosely.

If you go to End Wokeness, you will see nothing but propaganda designed to push a specifically right-wing narrative.

Yeah.

And I went and I watched that TED Talk and I have that clip.

And I want to play a little more of it.

I want to play a little bit before she starts saying what she says on there, the part that she says, and then how she explains herself afterwards.

Because I think it's really important where you cut the tape here.

But what about the hard things, the places where we are prone to disagreement, say politics and religion?

Well, as it turns out, not only does Wikipedia's model work there, it actually works really well.

Because in our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over disagreement about what the truth actually is.

But the people who write these articles, they're not focused.

on the truth.

They're focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now.

And after seven years of working with these brilliant folks, I've come to believe that they are onto something.

That perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start.

In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.

Now, that is not to say that the truth doesn't exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn't important.

Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things.

But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, One of the things that we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.

And so in the spirit of that, I'm certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you.

But this may not be the same truth.

This is because the truth of the matter is very often, for many people, what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world.

So we all have different truths.

They're based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.

You notice that they clip it very, very

purposefully clip it right after she says that so that the next statement that she says when she says, now that's not to say the truth doesn't exist.

That piece isn't in it, right?

So she says something and they clip it so it sounds like what she's saying is ridiculous, but they cut out the conclusion of her statement.

They cut out the last piece of her statement.

And she's not talking about objective things like this war started in this year.

She's not saying that.

She's not saying that this particular thing is where we have our disagreements.

She's saying we have our disagreements on politics and religion, which is something that a lot of people cannot decide the reality on.

Take, for instance, something like trickle-down economics.

There's probably a page about trickle-down economics or some more.

proper term about economics in Wikipedia.

There is probably a fight there between people who think it's a good idea and people who don't think it's a good idea.

And guess what?

You can't know objectively if it's a perfectly good or bad idea.

You have to have an opinion on that thing.

And there's a lot of things on Wikipedia that you have to have an opinion on to write on.

And they're talking about a consensus of opinion when they're talking about quote unquote truth, which is something that he completely misses because he only listened to 15 or 20 seconds of this very important longer piece that you need the context of to understand what she's saying.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's a great find because Joe didn't stop the video.

End wokeness stopped the video.

And End Wokeness chose to stop the video before she adds, now that's not to say that truth doesn't exist.

Because if you included that bit, it would invalidate every piece of criticism they have about what she was saying.

So they have selectively edited that.

And selective editing in that way is a propagandist tool.

That is creating propaganda by taking something real, stripping it of context and presenting it as if it was something else or saying something else.

And Joe just accepts that whole cloth, jokes about it with his buddy, goes further and saying, oh, isn't it ridiculous?

Oh, journalists, they should be looking for the truth ridiculous and they're using this to what end to the defunding of npr yes that is what they're trying to do they're agreeing with the calls to to defund npr over stuff like this and this stuff is deceptively edited to make them think that and then joe is spreading this to the millions of people who watch and listen to him Yeah, and Trickle Don Economics is trash.

You can send me your email.

That's fine, but it's total trash and I will die on this hill.

All right.

So next up is the last bit of the undercard section.

This is their final discussion about NPR.

Yeah, I got a pee real bad.

Let's just take a little break

and we'll come back.

Okay.

Right back, folks.

I didn't see a shit about that.

Maybe it's a joke.

But did you see that?

I sent you the Lockheed Martin thing, right?

I also sent you the thing that I was looking for earlier, which is

I think I believe he's a senator that's reading off the most ridiculous tweets from the CEO, former CEO of NPR.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Which senator is that?

Do you know?

I don't know.

Hold on.

I can find out.

Eric Schmidt.

Yes.

That's who it is.

Okay.

Yeah.

Senator from Missouri.

Okay.

Watch this.

This is this is fun.

This is just a fun one.

I thought it'd be appropriate to maybe read some of the craziest tweets from Catherine Maher, who is the CEO.

Put my glasses on here.

I'm so done with late-stage capitalism.

America is addicted to white supremacy.

I do wish Hillary wouldn't use the language of boy and girl.

It's a racing language for non-binary people.

Lots of jokes about leaving the U.S., and I get it.

But as someone with cis-white mobility trip, I'm thinking I'm staying and investing in ridding ourselves of the specter of tyranny.

Never underestimate the ability of white people to center ourselves.

White silence is complicity.

I'm white, so my hair doesn't automatically carry with it the freight of my race, worth, and everyone else's encoded assumptions.

I'm grateful to those who have pointed out my phrasing It could be understood as trans erasure.

Horses inspire all.

Horses inspire all and foster a sense of identity.

More kids should have access to these incredible animals.

But most horse spaces are white spaces.

Horse spaces are white spaces.

It keeps going.

I love the music.

The music is good.

Whoever came up with that soundtrack is good.

God Christ.

Yeah.

So he comes straight out of the P-brick and he plays this.

It's actively jarring.

Obviously, they talked about it like an hour and 45 minutes earlier or something, but he's playing this.

But Joe considered himself a curious guy who asks questions.

You ask the everyday kind of questions.

Why isn't he asking why a U.S.

senator chose to release this?

Chose to edit it with music in the background.

Whoever chose music is a genius.

It's good.

It's great.

Put that music on to make it as ridiculous as possible.

What agenda might that U.S.

senator have?

This is a good question that Joe could be asking.

And he doesn't ask those questions because it hits Joe square in his bias.

Exactly.

This is a senator doing it.

This is the libs of TikTokification of the US government.

This is the trolling sort of gone mainstreamed into the centers of government here.

And the point here is that it's okay to justify defunding publicly funded news broadcasting because he can find things that the CEO has tweeted that he thinks are silly.

And, you know, I think some of those things are a bit silly.

I don't find horse spaces inspiring, particularly.

I'm not inspired or given a sense of identity by horses, not in the least.

But I'll be perfectly honest, the CEO could have tweeted, Nanu, Nanu, I'm an alien from the planet Bork.

And it wouldn't particularly make me wonder whether

funding public access journalism was worthwhile.

Yeah, exactly.

Especially in a Congress hearing, Catherine Ma, who they talk about here, made clear that she has no editorial role at NPR.

She's the CEO.

She is not there for editorial content.

So this video is an act of propaganda and permission structure building.

We should get rid of this thing because of how bad NPR is.

And we know NPR is bad because of how silly this stuff is from the CEO.

And it's designed to appeal to someone like Joe to find its way through to Jaw through End Wokeness and various other places and libs of TikTok and things.

to find their way to Jaw and for Joe to then put it in front of his audience.

So his audience are now echoing the call to defund NPR because when they hear NPR, they're no longer thinking of the 77,000 articles across four years, 20,000 articles a year or whatever.

They're only thinking of that silly lady who said the silly thing about horses.

And somehow, all of this flowed at some point from the Epstein files and how journalists didn't do a good enough job.

And that's the real issue here is the journalists didn't do a good enough job trying to get to the bottom of Epstein.

And therefore, we should defund NPR.

Like logically, there's a logical connection between Epstein and NPR.

Like NPR was the problem all along.

And I would argue the problem with your president associating himself with paedophiles is not the journalist who did or didn't cover it.

Great point.

We'll have to peace.

So let's take a break and then we'll come back.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh, we're at the end of the program.

Was there something good in this?

I think there are a few good things.

We didn't cover them because they were fairly good.

Mike Baker, at one point, analyzes the damage that was caused in Iran by the U.S.

strikes on the nuclear capabilities.

And his analysis is pretty solid.

He assesses how much their capabilities have been set back, says it's not actually as far as all that, that the Trump's team have hugely overexaggerated it and done so they've been misleading.

I think it's a solid analysis.

Elsewhere, Joe Walsor, to his credit, points out that Trump ran on a promise of no more wars and he is reneging on that promise and they're now attacking countries and getting involved in uh geopolitical shenanigans um and i've got to applaud joe for being at least slightly consistent to that value of not wanting to go to war so yeah we can we can praise the two guys for those things i'd say how about you i think there are some points in this where joe will bring up a conspiracy and

uh Mike Baker will say, I don't believe it, or I think that's stupid, or I don't think, like, I don't like, like, show me, like, I don't, I don't understand what you're saying.

like that, show me the thing.

And I think that all of that is really good, that there's somebody who is, in my opinion, someone who maybe Joe's listeners would look to as a person who is sort of in the manosphere that is not gullible, that is saying things that might.

might convince someone who's listening that's that these conspiracy theories that Joe constantly latches onto might not have a ton of merit.

And that's a positive thing, I think.

And there's multiple, it doesn't just happen once.

It happens multiple times.

So, you know, I think, I think there is something to having somebody on there who might have this sort of background who can once in a while poke a pin in some of these balloons that Joe's blowing up every single episode.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

I would push back a little bit in that he does, in many cases, as you say, that he's not gullible, that he's willing to challenge these things.

Sometimes he just says, no, I think that UFO thing is bullshit.

It does make me wonder if he has those abilities in some topics.

Oh, no, absolutely.

When he's accepting things in other places, is that strategic gullibility in order to push an agenda?

We should question his agenda.

But yeah, you're absolutely right that he is willing to push back.

It's just, it shows who he is on the places where he isn't willing to push back or he's willing to actively share the conspiracy theory.

Yeah.

And I also recognize, too, that there are lots of moments, and we've played several of them where he's willing to accept completely the right-wing narrative.

So the right-wing narrative for him is not something that you go against, but these are things that are outside of that sphere and he pushes back on those constantly.

Yeah.

So that's it for our show this week.

And remember, you can access more than half an hour of bonus content every single week from as little as a dollar an episode.

You can do that by subscribing at patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

Meanwhile, you can hear more from Cecil at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed, and more from me at the Skeptics of the K podcast and the Skeptic podcast.

Plus, you can hear more from both of us on this show on the live podcast track at QED.

You can go to QDCon.org and buy a streaming ticket.

You can also hear us on The Skepticrat this last week.

We were both on The Skepticrat as well.

That's a very good point.

We absolutely were.

So there's lots of places that you can hear us.

And then, of course, you can come back next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

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